Rwanda hosts big family planning meet

Family planning conference opens in Kigali. PHOTOS BY GILLIAN NANTUME

What you need to know:

  • At the July 2017 London Summit on Family Planning, Dr Jane Ruth Achieng, the minister of health, pledged, on behalf of the government, to allocated $5m to the purchase of contraceptives.
  • Speakers highlighted findings from the 2018 Annual Report released on Monday by Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), a global partnership focused on enabling an additional 120 million women from the 69 of the world’s poorest nations (including Uganda) to access voluntary contraception by 2020.

KIGALI. Rwandan Prime Minister Édouard Ngirente has called for continued investment in family planning at the opening of the International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) convening in Rwanda from November 12-15, 2018.
During his keynote address, Mr Ngirente emphasised the far-reaching social and economic benefits of investing in family planning and called for global commitments to address challenges in contraceptives access.
“Family planning is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve the well-being of people in all countries. The African continent is very youthful [and] the biggest challenge facing African leaders today is how to harness our youthful population into agents of sustainable development. Investment in young people and in human capital, in general, can enable us to harness a demographic dividend across our continents,” he said.
More than 3,700 global policymakers, researchers, young people, faith leaders and family planning advocates from around the world have gathered in Kigali for the 2018 ICFP themed: Investing for a Lifetime of Returns, co-hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Rwanda.


Speakers highlighted findings from the 2018 Annual Report released on Monday by Family Planning 2020 (FP2020), a global partnership focused on enabling an additional 120 million women from the 69 of the world’s poorest nations (including Uganda) to access voluntary contraception by 2020.
According to the report, since 2012, 46 million more women and girls who want to avoid or delay pregnancy have begun using a modern method of contraception. This brings the total number of women and girls with access to modern contraceptives to 317 million in these countries. In Uganda, according to the report, the most preferred family planning method is Depo Provera.
“As of July 2018, the number of women and girls using a modern contraception was the highest in history. Let us build on the progress we have made until we achieve our ultimate goal: universal access,” Dr Natalia Kanem, the executive director United Nations Population Fund, said.



According to the report, in 2016, Uganda spent $2.26milion on domestic funding for family planning. In comparison, Kenya spent $19million in the same year.
The context
At the July 2017 London Summit on Family Planning, Dr Jane Ruth Achieng, the minister of health, pledged, on behalf of the government, to allocated $5m to the purchase of contraceptives. The money was not allocated and a scarcity of contraceptives hit upcountry public health centres because in the financial years of 2016/2017 and 2017/2018, government never procured family planning commodities.
Instead, the $2.5million that was allocated to reproductive health in the health budget was used to procure thousands of Mama Kits. As a result, National Medical Stores (NMS), which distributes contraceptives to public health facilities, run dry in December 2017. According to the ministry of health National Stock Status Report of family planning commodities released at the end of April 2018, NMS is totally stocked out.